Stadtgemeinde Bremen , IPA: With around , inhabitants, the Hanseatic city is the 11th largest city of Germany as well as the second largest city of Northern Germany after Hamburg. Bremen's port , together with the port of Bremerhaven at the mouth of the Weser, is the second largest port in Germany after the Port of Hamburg. Bremen is a major cultural and economic hub of Northern Germany. Bremen is well known through the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale " Town Musicians of Bremen " Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten , and there is a statue dedicated to it in front of the city hall.
Bremen has a reputation as a working-class city. Companies headquartered in Bremen include the Hachez chocolate company and Vector Foiltec. The marshes and moraines near Bremen have been settled since about 12, BC. But Ptolemy gives geographic coordinates, and these refer to a site northeast of the mouth of the river Visurgis Weser.
By the end of the 3rd century, they had merged with the Saxons. Charlemagne , the King of the Franks , made a new law, the Lex Saxonum , which forbade the Saxons from worshipping Odin the god of the Saxons ; instead they had to convert to Christianity on pain of death. In Willehad of Bremen became the first Bishop of Bremen. In the archdiocese of Hamburg merged with the diocese of Bremen to become Hamburg-Bremen Archdiocese, with its seat in Bremen, and in the following centuries the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen were the driving force behind the Christianisation of Northern Germany.
In , at the behest of Archbishop Rimbert , Kaiser Arnulf of Carinthia , the Carolingian King of East Francia , granted Bremen the rights to hold its own markets, mint its own coins and make its own customs laws. The city's first stone walls were built in Around that time trade with Norway, England and the northern Netherlands began to grow, thus increasing the importance of the city.
In the Bremian Prince-Archbishop Hartwig of Uthlede and his bailiff in Bremen confirmed — without generally waiving the prince-archbishop's overlordship over the city — the Gelnhausen Privilege , by which Frederick I Barbarossa granted the city considerable privileges.
